Mae Murray, 1889-1965: “The Girl With The Bee-Stung Lips”
Mae Murray, Cover Girl
D. J. “Duke” Dukesherer is a local writer and official historian of the Ballona Blog. He is the author of Beach of the King, The Early History of Playa Del Rey, Westchester, Playa Vista, CA, and ‘Round the Clump of Willows.
At various times, particularly from the mid-teens of the 20th century through the 1940’s, Playa del Rey was a playground for Hollywood’s elite, its directors, stars, and particularly starlets. The great comic actress Jean Arthur, for example, was the starlet chosen in 1927 to dedicate the dappled grey concrete streetlight poles that still grace the bluff above the village of Playa del Rey, in the development known then as Palisades del Rey.
Early in the teens of the 20th century, the actress Mae Murray worked her way up from the chorus of the famous Ziegfield Follies, and became a star of the club circuit in both the United States and Europe, performing with Clifton Webb, Rudolph Valentino, and John Gilbert as some of her many dance partners.
She made many films; and her most-famous role was probably in the Erich von Strohem-directed film The Merry Widow (1925), opposite John Gilbert. However, when silent movies gave way to talkies, Murray’s voice proved incompatible with the new magic of sound, and her career began to fade.
At her career peak in the early 1920s, Murray, along with such other notable Hollywood personalities as Cecil B. DeMille (who later became her neighbor in Playa Del Rey), Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Irving Thalberg, was a member of the board of trustees at the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a charitable organization that offers assistance and care to those in the motion picture and television industries without financial resources. She made many career mistakes, however, but somehow managed to squeak out a living for many years.
Murray Mansion (right); note the oil derricks marching the beach toward Venice. Photo courtesy Duke
Murray built an enormous mansion on the sand at 64th Avenue and Ocean Front Walk; across the street from the Del Rey Lagoon, and a few yards from Ballona Creek; literally at the estuary of the creek and the location of the former Port Ballona. Her beachfront parties, lasting days at a time, were attended by a virtual Who’s Who in Hollywood. Apparently she owned stock in some of the oil wells that were located in her back yard.
By 1933 however, she was broke herself, and ordered by the court to sell her opulent Playa del Rey estate to pay a judgment against her, and her life was never the same. Moving to New York to find work, she was arrested for vagrancy,found sleeping on a park bench. When she returned to California, she was often seen wandering the streets of Playa Del Rey and sitting on the beach near her former home.
In 1964, living off charity and devoted friends, the poor, deluded Murray continually traveled by transcontinental bus from coast to coast on a self promoted publicity tour, hoping for a comeback in movies.
On the last of these excursions, she lost herself during a stopover in Kansas City, Missouri, and wandered to St. Louis. The Salvation Army found her on the streets, and sent her back to Los Angeles. She rented a small Hollywood apartment near the Chinese Theatre, paid for by actor George Hamilton.
It has been speculated that the character Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), a washed-up silent superstar living in self-delusion, and who bragged about her wealth and ownership in producing oil wells, was based on Mae Murray, but the writers of the film. Billy Wilder and Charles Bracket would never admit it. The William Holden character, opposite Gloria Swanson, was named Joe Gillis.
Mae Murray passed away in 1965, at The Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, California, the place that she helped to found.
